Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On the lower eastern slopes of Mullaghnarakill mountain in County Kerry, peat-cutting and erosion have gradually uncovered something that had lain buried for millennia.

Nineteen examples of prehistoric rock art have come to light in the townland of Kealduff, roughly a kilometre northeast of Coomaglaslaw Lake, and the concentration is striking. Seventeen of them are clustered on either side of a track running beyond the end of a tarred road, while two further examples sit further upslope. The dominant view from both locations follows the course of the Behy river, with Castlemaine Harbour visible to the northeast and, between the mountains to the north, a glimpse of Dingle Bay.

The most closely documented of these carvings sits on a partly exposed section of level rock outcrop measuring 3.4 metres by 3 metres, decorated at its northern end. The vocabulary of motifs is characteristic of Irish prehistoric rock art: cup-and-ring marks, which are exactly what they sound like, a hemispherical depression hammered into the rock surface and encircled by one or more concentric carved rings, often with a radial groove cutting outward from the cup. At the northwest edge of this particular outcrop is a cup surrounded by five gapped rings, with a radial groove extending well beyond the outermost ring. Nearby, two cup-and-five-ring combinations appear side by side, each with radial lines running from cup to outer ring. Elsewhere on the same surface are cup-and-four-ring and cup-and-three-ring motifs, some with radial grooves, one with a gapped outer ring, and a scattering of simpler cupmarks and partial ring combinations. The motifs were recorded and documented by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula. The Kealduff carvings do not stand in isolation: two examples of rock art occur in the neighbouring townland of Letter West, and roughly a kilometre to the southeast lies the larger Coomasaharn rock art complex, suggesting this stretch of the Iveragh uplands held particular significance for the people who carved these marks, however that significance is now interpreted.

The site sits at around 138 metres above sea level in rough pasture that has become overgrown with scrub, and it had not been located on the ground at the time of the most recent field assessment. The carvings may therefore be difficult to find and harder still to read once found, obscured by vegetation on a gentle east-facing slope above the River Behy valley.

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